Auto-Regulation Training

By Mike Tuchscherer

“Listen
to your body.” That’s what I was told I
must do. “Okay, well how do I do that?”
I responded. Then the conversation
always deteriorated into vagaries. The
most I could get anyone to tell me was it was going to take me ten years to
learn how to do it.

TEN
YEARS!

That’s
a long time! I was a new coach and I had a team of powerlifters who depended on me to prepare them for competition. We didn’t have ten years to just figure it
out. But luckily for me, I had been
training myself for about that long, so I was starting to grasp some of what people meant by “listen to
your body”. So I set out to find my own
answers. I observed what I was
doing. I talked to other lifters and
asked a lot of questions. I began to
formulate the ideas for how to teach people to listen to their body.

Signal or noise?

You
see, at the time it was popular to tell people to listen to their body. Now the pendulum has shifted and people say
“how you feel is a lie”. As usual, the
truth is more nuanced. I personally
don’t like either catch phrase anymore.

How
you feel is not a lie. I can assure you
that you do actually feel the way you feel.
But what do you do about that feeling?
Ah ha! That is a much more useful
question! And the other side saying, “Listen
to your body”? Well they get it wrong
too. Often people that are “listening to
their body” are just over-valuing their emotional reactions. They get lost in the noise of emotions and
can’t find the signal.

Auto-regulation

Where
I’m going with this is toward auto-regulation.
Auto-regulation simply means adjusting the day’s training to fit the
body’s needs. It’s a course-correction;
a feedback loop. Every single strength
training system in the world that has demonstrated repeated success at the
highest levels has incorporated auto-regulation. Every one.
Not all use the same tools, but they all adapt to the fluctuating
capabilities of the lifter.

The
way many systems work is through continued oversight by a coach. The coach watches the lifter and adjusts the
program as needed to fit the lifter’s needs.
But many of us aren’t so lucky as to train with a top coach. I know that through most of my lifting
career, I had no coaching oversight. So
rather than auto-regulate in a way that relies on a coach’s eye, I found other
methods that I could use on my own.

How hard was that?

Probably
the single most important auto-regulatory tool you can use is RPE. RPE stands for “Rate of Perceived Exertion”
(a term that comes from endurance research).
It basically just means, “How hard did it feel?”

In
most cases, you probably use a primitive version of this already. If you note a set as having felt particularly
hard or easy, that is in essence RPE.
But we can refine it a bit more and it becomes much more useful. Consider the following chart:

RPE

Description

10

Maximum
effort. No reps left in the tank.

9

Could
have done one more rep.

8

Could
have done two or three more reps

7

More
than 3 reps left. Bar speed was fast
if maximum effort was applied.

6

Bar
speed was fast with only moderate effort

*RPE’s
below 6 aren’t important for strength training purposes.

**We
use a 1-10 scale (clearly focusing on 6+) because there was a precedent for it
and a 1-10 scale is intuitively understood.

So
now when you finish a set of squats, you say to yourself, “Yeah, that was hard
but I could have done 1 more rep.”
Great. You would annotate that as
“@9” (meaning a 9 RPE). This is very
easy to compare to other work that you’ve done in the past.

If
I write, “That felt heavy,” two weeks later I will have forgotten what exactly
that means. And if I repeat the same or
similar work, it will be very difficult to see if I improved or not. On the other hand, if I say that set was
“@9”, then that communicates a more precise level of effort. And if next week’s work is “@8”, then I know without
a doubt I’m progressing.

More than just vanity

Aiding
in precise communication is a big deal, but it can also help you auto-regulate. Remember, we want to allow the program to
adapt. This means, among other things,
that if the program works great and we get stronger very quickly, then we
should train with heavier weights. And
conversely, if we’re having a bad day, then it’s better to train with lighter
weights than miss reps in training altogether.
The program must adapt.

So
for myself and for my lifters, we don’t plan training based on percentages of
1RM at all. Instead, we have a target
number of reps and RPE. I go to the gym
knowing that my top set of deadlifts will be x5 @9 (that’s 5 repetitions with a
weight I could probably get 6 times). I
might have an idea of what weight this will be, but it’s almost impossible to
know in advance whether you’ll have a good day, a bad day, or a normal
day. So I start working up toward the
top weight for the day and I increase a little at a time until I reach the target
RPE. If my target weight was 100 pounds
x5 @9, then it might look like this:

50
pounds x 5 reps

70
pounds x 5 reps

80
pounds x 5 reps

90
pounds x 5 reps @7

95
pounds x 5 reps @8

100
pounds x 5 reps @9

Then
we could perform whatever additional work was planned that day.

The
beauty of using this method is that if the lifter is having a good day, it will
take heavier weights to reach the goal of x5 @9. This can help keep the progress going. If the lifter has a bad day, less weight
produces x5 @9. This keeps the bad day
from snowballing and allows you to build progress over time. The weight on the bar adjusts automatically
to the abilities of the lifter.

The right tool for
the job

RPE
training is not for everyone. It takes
some experience to use RPE accurately, though it’s considerably less than 10
years! So if you’re a beginner, then
don’t rely on RPE just yet. Do your
normal program and just record the RPE so you can practice and see what
happens.

RPE
is also not good for people who are very lazy or very aggressive. Either of those extremes will not be able to
accurately judge their RPE. But usually
this isn’t a problem. The very aggressive
lifters tend not to like this method anyway and the very lazy lifters usually
can’t make it to the gym at all.

How to use it

If
you’re just learning about RPE, then I recommend that you keep doing whatever
program you’re already doing. Just
practice rating the RPE for each set.
Once you get the hang of rating your RPE, you’ll start to see patterns
emerge. It’s at that time that you can
start auto-regulating your program by adjusting the weights to fit your daily
abilities.

Of
course there’s much more to learn. RPE’s
are one tool that will help you auto-regulate training. There are several others – many of which
build on the RPE concept. But take one
step at a time. Get comfortable to RPE,
then learn more about auto-regulation when you’re ready.

It matters

I’ve
been able to coach lifters of all levels over the years – from the very new to
world champions, from the young to the old, men, women, heavy, light, and so
forth. The pursuit of progress is one
thing that ties us all together and using auto-regulatory tools helps me see
progress in lifters of all walks. I cannot
take credit for their achievements – after all, they did the work. But RPE helps us function as a better team by
providing clear communication and auto-regulated training, even at a
distance. I’m sure it will help you too. Take care and train well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Tuchscherer is the owner of Reactive Training Systems, a company dedicated to individualized strength training. The goal of RTS is to make stronger people in an ethically and intellectually honest way. Learn more by visiting www.ReactiveTrainingSystems.com.

Mike himself is an accomplished Powerlifter. He has over 17 years of experience training and researching the best training methods in the world. He currently holds the World Record deadlift and total for the 120kg class. He has coached 18 other World-level competitors including 3 other World Record holders, along with hundreds of “regular lifters”. He says, “Everyone is just after the next PR.”